Alarmed at the trend of these memories and hasty inferences, he controlled himself, to reflect only on the more instant question of Eve's death, and the evidence he must give at the trial. It would appear that until 'Dolphus was condemned, even the Claxtons did not fear his tongue. To give evidence against him, and at the same time to seal his tongue, appeared to be Durgan's immediate duty, but the performance seemed difficult. What bribe, what threat could move a condemned man who was but a waif in the world, and need care for none but himself?
Yet if rational meaning was to be granted at all to his raving on the night of Eve's death, it would appear that even this creature had a reverence for Miss Claxton, and a desire to be the object of her prayers. Was this motive strong enough to be worked upon? It would be better, no doubt, to gain an interview with the prisoner and try to discover if he had any tenacity of purpose, but to this Durgan felt strong repugnance.
In avoiding this issue, his mind began to torment him regarding the evidence against Miss Claxton, which he alone knew, and which he might not have a right to conceal. His ardent belief in her goodness, his firm belief that he had heard Eve die, rested only on intuitive insight, common in men of solitary habit and unscholarly minds; he knew that this was no basis on which to found legal evidence.
With these uneasy and unfinished thoughts he at last fell asleep in the faint light of the dawn, and waked again soon with a vivid and bad dream.
He dreamed that he was again on the lonely mountain on the night of Eve's death, groping under the stunted thicket of old oak. Again he saw Miss Claxton come to the forked tree. She climbed as before, and reached up one thin arm to deposit something in the highest cleft of the trunk. The moon rose as before; Durgan saw in his dream that the thing she hid there was a knife, and the blade was red. Rousing himself from a sleep that brought so odious a vision, he woke to find the rays of a red sunrise in his face.
One of his laborers brought up the borrowed horse which he had arranged to ride to Hilyard. Before he started he went up the trail to the summit house, hoping that Alden might be about. He had nothing definite to ask, and yet he would have been glad to have some parting advice from him. No one was up. The very house was drowsy under the folded petals of its climbing flowers. Durgan went down through the stunted oak wood, and looked up as he passed the forked tree. It was the first time he had been close to it in daylight. In one branch of the fork, close to the notch, there was a round hole, such as squirrels choose for their nests. Better hiding-place for a small object could not be. To act the spy so far as to look into the hole without Miss Claxton's permission would have been what Durgan called "a nigger's trick." Like all the better class of slave-owners, he habitually sought to justify his own assumption of superiority by holding himself high above all mean actions or superstitious ideas. As he went down the hill he was vexed with himself for having been so far influenced by a dream as to have even looked for the hole in the tree.
Yet as he rode out into the glorious morning, he found himself arguing that if money for the mulatto had been put in the tree, it was odd that the mulatto had made no effort to get it before his arrest or to send for it after. The thing which had really been put there, if not meant for 'Dolphus, was probably intended to be long hidden. But a dream, of course, meant nothing, and his could easily be accounted for by the tenor of his waking thoughts and the color of the sunrise.
When he reached the saw-mill he turned by the long, wooden mill-race and set his horse at a gentle gallop for Hilyard. Even at that speed he began to wonder whether if, by such evidence as had convinced Bertha, he were induced to hold the erroneous opinion of Miss Claxton's guilt, he would be also forced into Bertha's conclusion, that fits of mania were the only explanation. Since last night he had called Bertha a fool; now, while most unwelcome suspicions followed him like tormenting demons, he was driven into greater sympathy with the younger sister.
He galloped gently down the slope of the valley, tree and shrub and flower rushing past him in the freshness of the morning. Suddenly he checked his horse to look up. He was beneath his own precipice. The mine was on a ledge about three hundred feet above him. The rock rose sheer some hundred and fifty feet above that. He could trace the opening of the trail, but even the smoke of the hidden dwelling-house could not be seen here. As Durgan listened for the faint chink of his workmen's tools, and sought from this unfamiliar point of view to trace each well-known spot, he began, for the first time, to realize fully the dreadfulness of the story which only yesterday had revealed.
Involuntarily he drew rein. The memory that had transfixed him was the description of the Claxton murder. While the step-mother had been killed by only one well-aimed shot, the father had been beaten with such brutal rage that no likeness of the living man appeared in the horrid shape of the dead.